Posts tagged ‘technology’

Since (mostly) leaving Facebook, and cutting down on Twitter, Iāve come to realize the extent of how outdated traditional computing definitions have become. To help those who need to get up to speed, Iāve compiled a few technobabble words and translated them into normal English.

app: in many cases, an extremely limited web browser for your cellphone that only works with one site, as opposed to a proper web browser that works with many sites.

clean install: something entirely unnecessary, but suggested by tech support people who want to cover up buggy operating systems (q.v. Windows 10).

cloud: hackable online repository of naughty photos of celebrities.

comments’ section: when you see this while surfing, it’s a reminder to leave the web page you are on and make up your own mind.

Facebook: a website where bots live, where post-sharing is intentionally broken to ensure you need to pay for attention. Once paid, your posts are shared with bots, so even fewer humans actually see them.

Facebook friend: (a) a friend; (b) a total stranger; (c) a bot.

Google: (a) a virtual hole into which you dump all your private information, to be sold on to corporations, but feel good doing it because you gave it up to a private company to use against you rather than have the state take it to use against you; (b) a cult that supports (a), whose members will think you have a degenerative brain disease if you dare question the perfection of their god.

malware scanner: malware (especially when offered by Facebook, q.v.).

messenger app: an inefficient messaging program where typing takes 10 times as long as on a desktop or laptop computer. Designed to dissuade you from actually calling the person.

phone: portable computing device, not used to make calls.

remote desktop: when your operating system fails, and the odds of you seeing your familiar screen are remote.

social media: media where people are antisocial.

Twitter: (a) social media with no discernible rules on who gets kicked off and why; (b) where the US president gets angry.

white balance: when racists attack people of colour but pretend they are noble and against racism.

Weibo: a website monitored by the Chinese Communist Party, where users have more freedom than on Facebook and Twitter.

Windows 10: a buggy operating system that requires 10 goes at any updates or patches, hence the name.

In amongst all the political fallout of the National Party this weekāwhat Iām dubbing (and hashtagging) ācaught in the Rossfireāāwas a series (well, over 100) Tweets from Morgan Knutson, a designer who once worked for Google. Unlike most Googlers, especially the cult-like ones who refuse to help when you point out a fault with Google, Knutson decided he would be candid and talk about his experience. And it isnāt pretty. Start here:

Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was.

I'm still pissed about the bait and switch they pulled by telling me I'd be working on Chrome, then putting me on this god forsaken piece of shit on day one.

Or, if you prefer, head to the Twitter page itself, or this Threader thread.
As anyone who follows this blog knows, Iāve long suspected things to be pretty unhealthy within Google, and it turns out that itās even worse than I expected.
A few take-outs: (a) some of the people who work there have no technical or design experience (explains a lot); (b) there’s a load of internal politics; (c) the culture is horrible but money buys a lot of silence.
Knutson claims to have received a lot of positive feedback, some in private messaging. His Tweets on the aftermath:

Iāve received a number of DMs from former and current google employees that say theyāve experienced similar things.

This, I thought, summed it up better than I could, even though I’ve had a lot more space to do it:

This reads like a Google version of 'Chaos Monkeys': unvarnished, unblinking, just the right amount of sneering, and merciless when it comes to arrogant mediocrity and the machinery of cushy ass-kissing mixed with an un-fuck-up-able monopoly that underwrites the outlandish pay. https://t.co/PmB6zYwgZT

I think the signs of a departure from Twitter are all there. Certainly on a cellphone there’s little point to it any more. As of last week, this began happening.

If you donāt seesee me on Twitter as often, itās becausebecause itāsitās no longer compatible withwith the Swype keyboardkeyboard on my phonephone. I canātcanāt be botheredbothered correcting faults createdcrcreated by technologytechnology and not me. Other sites are fine.

That last sentence refers only to the fact that Twitter is the only website on the planet where the keyboard is incompatible. (Thanks to Andrew McPherson for troubleshooting this with me.) Other sites are buggy, too: earlier today I couldn’t delete something from Instagram (being owned by Facebook means all the usual Facebook databasing problems are creeping in), and one video required four upload attempts before it would be visible to others:

I couldn’t reply on the Facebook website to a direct message (clicking in the usual typing field does nothing, and typing does nothing) except in image form, so I sent my friend this:

Earlier this year, many friends began experiencing trouble with their Facebook comments: the cursor would jump back to the beginning of text fields, pushing the first few characters they typed to the end. Others are complaining of bugs more and more oftenāreminds me of where I was four or five years ago. And we all now know about Facebook bots, four years after I warned of an ‘epidemic’.
It’s as I always expected: those of us who use these sites more heavily encounter the bugs sooner. Vox was the same: I left a year before Six Apart closed it down, and the bugs I encountered could never be fixed. I’m actually going through a similar battle with Amazon presently, blog post to come.
Now, since Mastodon and others work perfectly fine, and there’s no end of trouble to Big Tech, it’s inevitable that we jump ship, isn’t it?

No, this isn’t my idea: Reed Allman used a version of this in his Medium post about de-Googling.

Looks like Iām not the only one writing about de-Googling, even if this piece in Medium is many years after I wrote about my efforts in 2009ā10. (Here’s an even earlier one.)
It does mean that others are becoming warier of Googleās privacy intrusions, if itās now a mainstream issue. Reed Allmanās piece is very good, and it was interesting to see that it took him 36 days and upward of US$1,500 to get free of Googleās clutches. Iām sure it can be done for less with some judicious use of certain services. It’s far better having it all in one place (unlike my documenting nearly a decade ago), and his guide is bang up to date.
I will recommend Zoho ahead of others as a Gmail alternative, only because of personal experience and Zohoās excellent customer service. I havenāt used Zohoās office programs but I assume they are the equal of Google Docs et al.
He does conclude that he didnāt feel others were convinced about following suit, which is sometimes how I feel when these warnings fall on deaf ears. (And youāve already heard me go on about other Big Tech players elsewhere.)

Like this:

Above: I must report and block dozens of Instagram accounts a day, not unlike getting over the 200-a-day mark on Facebook in 2014.

For the last few days, I made my Twitter private. It was the only time in 11 years of being on the service where I felt I needed that level of privacy; I only made things public again when I realized that I couldnāt actually contact people who werenāt already following me.
However, it was relatively blissful. Accounts with automated following scripts were blocked as I had to approve them manually. I had far fewer notifications. And I only heard directly back from people I liked.
It actually reminded me of the āold daysā. Itās why Mastodon appeals: since there were only a million people on there at the end of last year, it felt like Twitter of old (even if it has already descended far enough for actor Wil Wheaton to get abused, compelling him to leave).
The quieter few days also got me thinking: I had far more business success prior to social media. I was blogging at Beyond Branding, and that was a pretty good outlet. I emailed friends and corresponded like pen pals. Those werenāt fleeting friendships where the other party could just ālikeā what you said. If I really think about it, social media have done very little in terms of my business.
Iām not saying that social media donāt have a purposeāa viral Tweet that might get quoted in the press could be useful, I supposeābut I really didnāt need them to be happy in my work and my everyday life.
Since giving up updating my Facebook wall in 2017, I havenāt missed telling everyone about what Iām up to, because I figured that the people who needed to know would know. Twitter remained a useful outlet because there are some people on there whose interactions I truly value, but as you can surmise from what I said above, the number of notifications didnāt matter to me. I donāt need the same dopamine hit that others do when someone likes or re-Tweets something of theirs.
Interestingly, during this time, I logged into Whatsapp, an app I load once every three months or so since I have a few friends on it. I saw a video sent to me by Stefan Engeseth:

When I look at my Instagram stats, theyāre back to around 2015 levels, and with these current trends, my usage will drop even further as we head into 2019.
And I really donāt mind. The video shows just why social media arenāt what theyāre cracked up to be, and why they arenāt ultimately healthy for us.
I can add the following, that many of you who read this blog know: Facebook is full of bots, with false claims about their audience, and engages in actual distribution of questionable invasive software, charges Iāve levelled at the company for many years, long before the world even heard of Christopher Wylie. Twitter is also full of bots but actually disapproves of services that help them identify them; they have double standards when it comes to what you can and canāt say; and, perhaps most sadly, those people who have viewpoints that are contrary to the mainstream or the majority are shat on by disorganized gangs of Tweeters. Thatās not liberty. Instagram is also full of botsālike when I was on Facebook, when I reported dozens to hundreds of bots a dayāand there seems to be no end to them; it also lies when it talks about how its advertising works. Given all of these problems, why would I provide these services with my precious time?
I engage with these social media in more and more limited fashion and I wouldnāt be surprised if Iām completely away from these big tech names in due course.
Itās not as though young people are active on them, so the idea that they are services where you can get the next generation of customers is bogus. If you say youāre on Facebook, you might be considered an old-timer now. I asked a Year 11 student here on work experience what he used. Facebook wasnāt one of them. He said most of his friends Snapchatted, while he was in to Reddit. He didnāt like Facebook because it wasnāt real, and we have a generation who can spot the BS and the conceit behind it.
It does make the need for services such as Duck Duck Go even greater, for us to get unbiased information not filtered by Googleās love of big corporations, in its quest to rid the web of its once meritorious nature. Google is all about being evil.
As we near the 2020s, a decade which we hope will be more caring and just than the ones before, itās my hope that we can restore merit to the system and that we find more ethical alternatives to the big names. I canāt see as great a need to show off fake lives on social media when itās much more gratifying, for me at least, to return to what I did at the beginning of the century and let the work speak for itself.

The Associated Press had an exclusive this week: Google does not obey your opt-out preferences.
I could have told you that in 2011. Oh wait, I did. And I pointed out other instances where Google ignored your request to pause your history, continuing to track you either through its main site or its properties such as YouTube.
This latest story related to Google tracking peopleās movements on their Android phones.
The AP found that Google lies: what it claims Location History does on its website is not what it actually does.
In 2011, I proved that Google lied about its Ads Preferences Manager (no, it doesn’t use apostrophes): it said one thing on its website and did another. In 2014 and 2015 I showed Google lied about what it would do with your search histories.Instagram does that these days with its advertising preferences, saying you can control them via Facebook when, in fact, it stores another set altogether which you have no control over. If I get time I’ll post my proof. It makes you wonder if the same dishonest programmers are running things, or whether itās part of Big Techās culture to lie.
This is nothing new: they all lie, especially about unwanted surveillance, and have been doing so for a long time. Itās just that mainstream media are finally waking up to it.

āThere’s an old Polish proverb ā¦’ I believe it’s ‘Reality television can’t stop the motorways in Warsaw from getting icy.’

I’ve always known what sort of telly I liked, and often that was at odds with what broadcasters put on. In the 1970s, my tastes weren’t too dissimilar from the general public’s, but as the years went on, they diverged from what New Zealand programmers believed we should watch.
Shows I liked would prematurely disappear (Dempsey & Makepeace), only to return very late at night a decade later. Some only ever appeared late at night (Hustle), then vanish (in New Zealand, seasons 5 to 8 have never appeared on a terrestrial channel, and they have also never been released on DVD).
We had a British expat visitor on Wednesday. He arrived here in 2008, and had no idea that TV1 had once been the home of British programming, and TV2 was where the Hollywood stuff went.
By the late 2000s and early 2010s, I was watching either DVDs or finding a way to get to BBC Iplayer et al, because less and less of what was on offer had any appeal. We had boxed sets of Mission: Impossible, The Persuaders, and others.
When the country switched to Freeview, I couldn’t be bothered getting a decoder. We were fine with online. Eventually, I did buy a TV set with Freeview, but only because the previous one conked out.
On Thursday night, it became very apparent just how bad television had become here.
Every English-language and Te Reo Māori terrestrial channel had unscripted drama, i.e. “reality” shows, or the occasional panel show or real-life event, other than Prime, showing the MacGyver remake.
Who in the 1980s would have predicted that MacGyver would be the only scripted series on air during prime-time here between 7.30 and 8.30 p.m.?
I realize the economics of television have changed, and there’s no such thing as a TVNZ drama department any more.
Shows which might have had the whole country watching would be lucky to pull in a quarter of the audience today.
But it is a sad reflection that the televised equivalent of the weekly gossip rag is what rates. The effort needed to produce quality drama is expensive, and not enough of us support it.
I also imagine scripted Hollywood shows are cheaper than British ones, hence what we see on our screens is Americanāand why some kids these days now speak with American accents. Yet to some New Zealanders, Chinese-language signs on Auckland high streets are a bigger threat to the local culture. Really?
In this household, we vote with our attention spansāand over the last month that has meant DVDs of Banacek and, in true 50 shades of Grade fashion, The Protectors. Sometimes, you feel it’s 1972 in this houseābut at least the telly was better then.

The EU gets it when it comes to fines. Rather than the paltry US$17 million certain US statesā attorneys-general stung Google with some years ago for hacking Iphones, theyāve now fined the search engine giant ā¬4,340 million, on top of its earlier fine of ā¬2,420 million over anticompetitive behaviour.
That US$17 million, I mentioned at the time, amounted to a few hoursā income at Google.
As the EUās competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager noted on Twitter, āFine of ā¬4,34 bn to @Google for 3 types of illegal restrictions on the use of Android. In this way it has cemented the dominance of its search engine. Denying rivals a chance to innovate and compete on the merits. Itās illegal under EU antitrust rules. @Google now has to stop itā.
Google forces manufacturers to preinstall Chrome if they want to install Google Play. The EU also notes that virtually all Android devices have Google Search preinstalled, and most users never download competing apps, furthering Googleās dominance of search. Google pays manufacturers and cellphone networks to preinstall the Google search app on their phones, and prevented manufacturers from installing Google apps if their versions of Android were not approved by Google.DuckDuckGo, my search engine of choice, welcomed the decision. It noted:

Up until just last year, it was impossible to add DuckDuckGo to Chrome on Android, and it is still impossible on Chrome on iOS. We are also not included in the default list of search options like we are in Safari, even though we are among the top search engines in many countries.

Their anti-competitive search behavior isn't limited to Android. Every time we update our Chrome browser extension, all of our users are faced with an official-looking dialogue asking them if they'd like to revert their search settings and disable the entire extension.

Thatās consumer confusion on top of restrictive contracts that promote market dominance and anti-competitive behaviour.
This is a very petty company, one that shut down Vivaldiās Adwords accountafter its CEO gave some interviews about privacy.
Of course Iām biased, and I make no apology for itāand anyone who has followed my journey on this blog from being a Google fan to a Google-sceptic over the last decade and a half will know just how Googleās own misleading and deceptive conduct helped changed my mind.
Googleās argument, that many Android manufacturers installed rival apps, clearly fell on deaf ears, and understandably so. While Iām sure Android experts can think up examples, as a regular person who occasionally looks at phones, even those ones with rival apps still ship with the Google ones. In other words, thereās simply more bloat. Iāve yet to see one in this country ship without a Chrome default and Google Play installed, often in such a way that you canāt delete it, and Google Services, without getting your phone rooted.
I did read this in the Murdoch Press and thought it was a bit of a laugh, but then maybe my own experience isnāt typical:

The impact of any changes mandated by the EU decision on Googleās ability to target ads to usersāand to its profitabilityāis an open question. The two apps targeted in the EU decision, Googleās search and its Chrome browser, are extremely popular in their own right. Consumers are likely to seek them out from an app store even if they werenāt preinstalled on the phone, said Tarun Pathak, an analyst at research firm Counterpoint.

I just donāt believe they would, and I made it a point to get a phone that would, happily, have neither. By buying a Chinese Android phone, I escape Googleās tracking; by seeking out the Firefox browser, I get to surf the way I want. That choice is going to create competition, something that Google is worried about.The Wall Street Journal also states that despite the earlier fine, Googleās shopping rivals said little or nothing has actually happened.
With all of Googleās misdeeds uncovered on this blog over the years, Iām really not surprised.
The EU is, at the very least, forcing some to examine just how intrusive Google is. It might soon discover how uncooperative Google can be.

I have often said that each new technology often goes downhill when unsavoury parts of our society get to it. Email was fine before spammers, Wikipedia was fine without sociopaths, Blogger was fine without Google ownership, and Google was fine without an NYSE listing.
But what does one make of Twitter? Once upon a time, it was a decent place to hang out. Ask Stephen Fry.
Today, however, with all sorts of people on it, the post-spammer, post-sociopath stage appears to be: watch the rich lose it.
Those who don’t like President Trump might think I’m thinking of him, but it was actually Elon Musk, whose efforts on so many fronts I have publicly admired, who seems to be the latest in turning his corner of Twitter into an angry man’s rant record.
Not long ago, I saw Musk argue with a Tweeter about economics and blocking him. Of course it’s everyone’s prerogative to block as they see fit, but I always remember what my parents told me when I was a child: the really powerful see the big picture. They don’t sweat the small stuff. And this seems like someone sweating the small stuff. Even if he is the 53rd richest person in the world.From Techcrunch (hat tip to Adeline Chua):

Just goes to show that u may own a space exploration company, run an automobile business, be 53rd richest person in the world but still spend time bickering on social media like everyone else.A monumental idiot indeed.

I’m not sure what Musk intends with all of these Tweets, but I’m losing respect for the man. He probably wouldn’t care what I think, but then, going on the earlier Tweets, he probably does.
As someone who leads a much, much smaller bunch of companies, I know the boss’s public statements do impact on the rest of the team, and how your firm’s perceived.
If we look at the rich, Sir Richard Branson is a great ambassador for his ventures and is careful about what he says. His brands are tied in with his personal image, and he’s well aware of that. Elon Musk is not an exception: his personality and announcements are keeping Tesla’s faithful invested in the brand, for instance.
On the one hand, it’s great that Twitter is a great leveller. But with that comes other risks. If it is a leveller, bringing everyone to the level of the village merchant, then we can make a choice about whom we deal with.
In a real-life village, when we walk round, we may choose to buy from certain people and not others, because of how we’re treated or what their reputation’s like.
In this virtual village, we have one of the wealthiest players ranting in the corner.
And therein lies the risk for Tesla and SpaceX. Maybe he’s so confident at his lead that, with or without him, his dreams can come true. It would be great if we did have more electric cars and more affordable space exploration. However, while the founder is still young, alive and kicking, I’m afraid these ventures are still very much tied to how we perceive him. I’m not sure that being a rich, angry Tweeter who calls a rescuer a ‘pedo’ is the image that a Tesla buyer, for instance, wants to be associated with.
Frankly, if we’re going to remember anyone in the whole Thai cave rescue, let it be Saman Kunan, the former Thai navy SEAL diver who lost his life.

There was an Epson bag hanging from the back of my bedroom door, hidden by larger bags. I opened it up to discover brochures from my visit to a computer fair in 1989 (imaginatively titled Computing ā89), and that the bag must have been untouched for decades.
I’ve no reason to keep its contents (if you want it, message me before Thursday, as the recycling comes the morning after), but I wanted to make some scans of the exhibitors’ catalogue for nostalgia.
Let’s start with the cover. It’s sponsored by Bits & Bytes. Kiwis over a certain age will remember this as the computer magazine in this country.

You can tell this is a product of the 1980s by the typesetting: someone couldn’t be bothered buying the condensed version of ITC Avant Garde Gothic, so they made do with electronically condensing Computers and Communications. In fact, they’re a bit light on condensed fonts, full stop, as they’ve done the same with the lines set in Futura.
While the practice is still around, the typeface choices mark this one out as a product of its time.
Inside is a fascinating article on the newfangled CD-ROM being a storage medium. Those cuts of Helvetica and Serifa are very 1980s, pre-desktop publishing. It should be noted that Dr Jerry McFaul remained with the USGS, where he had been since 1974, till his retirement. The fashions are interesting here, as is ITC Fenice letting us know that he’s speaking at the Terrace Regency Hotel, a hotel I have no recollection of whatsoever. I can only tell you that it must have been on the Terrace.
The other tech speakers have a similar look to the visiting American scientist, all donning suitsāsomething their counterparts in 2018 probably wouldn’t today. In fact, the suit seems to be a thing of the past for a lot of events, and I often feel I’m the oldster when I wear mine.
The article itself makes a strong case for CD-ROM storage, being more space-saving and better for the environment: it’s interesting to know that the ‘depletion of the ozone layer’ was a concern then, though 30 years later we have been pretty appalling at doing anything about it.

The second article in the catalogue of any note was on PCGlobe, supplied to the magazine on 5Ā¼-inch diskette.Bits & Bytes would have run the catalogue as part of the main magazine, and did a larger run of these inner pages, back in the day when printing was less flexible.
It’s a fascinating look back at how far we’ve come (on the tech) and how far we haven’t come (on the environment). Next year, we’ll be talking about 1989 as ā30 years ago,’ yet we live in an age where we’re arguing over Kylie Jenner’s wealth. Progress?